Minami-Machida Grandberry Park about 60 years ago and today

History of Minami-Machida Grandberry Park

The station name Minami-Machida Grandberry Park was born in 2019. Until then it was a station with the short name Minami-Machida, on the side that express trains passed through on the Tokyu Den-en-toshi Line. It is land opened in the valley of the Sakai River, which flows along the border between Tokyo and Kanagawa Prefecture at the southern edge of the City of Machida, and if you cross the river south from the station area you enter the City of Yamato.

The valley carved by the Sakai River

If you change how you measure elevation, the shape of this land comes into view. The measuring point at the station is 71.7 m. From there it rises about 8 m to the north, about 5 m to the west and south, and a little over 2 m to the east too. It is a clear valley floor, high on all four sides and low in the center. The Sakai River (sakai means border) carved the valley, and the river's name comes from the fact that it formed the border between Musashi and Sagami. The same place name, Tsuruma, sits on both banks of the river, and this too is a view only possible on land where administration was divided at a provincial border. The way rainwater gathers on low land is not something to talk about from imagination, so check the hazard maps issued by the City of Machida and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

Slopes filled with furrows of fields

Neither the station nor the tracks appear in the 1961-69 aerial photograph. Fields divided finely into strips meet the eye, with stripes of furrows packed across the slopes. Along the valleys, dense woods meander as bands, and just tracing their shapes lets you read the paths of the water. Houses are clustered by the dozen along the roads in the valleys and on the ridges, and everything in between is farmland. Only one wide road crosses the frame diagonally, passing over the hills toward the southwest. In this valley before the railway came, it was that road that connected it to places far away. The lots of the fields change direction with the tilt of the slopes, and you can read directly how human hands followed the relief of the land.

In the 1974-78 photograph, a whole corner on the west side has changed its face. Roads drawn as if with a ruler and long, narrow lots are laid out all over, yet not even half of the buildings have been built. It is a view peculiar to prepared land where only the lots are finished first, and the white lot lines and brown bare ground make a geometric pattern. In the center, two wide motor roads run side by side, and a bridge of a grade-separated crossing can also be seen, small. This is where the Tomei Expressway and National Route 246 pass shoulder to shoulder, showing that roads for cars crossed the valley before the railway. The lower third of the photograph was taken on a different day, and the clear switch in color tone is also something to look at.

It was in 1976 that the Den-en-toshi Line was extended this far and Minami-Machida Station opened, exactly overlapping with the era of this photograph. From Nagatsuta Station toward the southwest, the tracks had extended one station at a time every few years: to Tsukushino Station in 1968 and to Suzukakedai Station in 1972. With the 1976 extension the line reached Tsukimino Station, and Minami-Machida Station was placed on the way. It took eight years to arrive at the valley on the border between Tokyo and Kanagawa. In 1984 it was extended further to Chuo-Rinkan Station and connected with the Odakyu Enoshima Line, and the line was completed as a commuter line linking suburban residential land. It is a section where residential development along the line and the extension of the tracks advanced hand in hand, and the order in which the town took shape after the station was built can be confirmed directly by following the eras of the photographs.

The 1979-83 and 1987-90 photographs have a band-shaped gap in the center, and the station area itself does not appear. Even so, the changes can be followed by looking around it. On the north side, the rows of houses among the fields grow thicker, and in the southwest, warehouses and factories with large white roofs begin to line up. The one worth reading closely is 1984-86, an era in which the area around the station is also photographed. On the southeast side of the station, a large area of leveled bare ground appears, and inside it a lot that looks like a sports ground drawing an arc can be seen. The prepared land on the west side has filled with roofs, and the town that was only lots has finally started to move as a town.

From mall to park

The station area moved greatly again in 2000. In that year, Grandberry Mall opened on the south side of the station. It operated for 17 years as an outdoor outlet mall and closed in 2017. The former site was reorganized together with the adjacent Tsuruma Park, and in 2019 it opened as Grandberry Park, in which the commercial facilities and the park form one continuous whole. The station name also changed in the same year, becoming Minami-Machida Grandberry Park Station. The way the wide flat land in front of the station is used has, each time, decided the character of this town.

The record of official land prices (Chika Koji) also reflects the ups and downs of the town. The measuring point placed at the residential land in Tsuruma 3-chome, Machida, is about 360 m from the location. Its official land price was 195,000 yen per square meter in 1983, and it shot up to 653,000 yen in 1988. That is a rise of more than three times in five years, and in terms of the photographs it overlaps with the period when the prepared land on the west side filled with roofs and the southeast of the station was leveled. The decline continued for a long time from there, and in 2005 and 2006 it fell to 195,000 yen, the same value as in 1983 when the record began. With the 195,000 yen of 1983, 2005 and 2006 as the bottom up to the 2026 publication, it rose over about 20 years with years of small falls in between, and in 2025 it is 288,000 yen. In the 2026 publication it is 314,000 yen. It is far from the peak year, but it is a value more than 1.6 times the bottom years.

As of 2026, the station area is made up of a commercial zone where several low-rise large roofs continue in a row and a wooded park continuing to its west. This group of white roofs and the green that edges it first catch the eye in today's aerial photograph. The two motor roads crossing the valley run at the same position and the same angle as in the 1974-78 photograph, and with that band as the border, the use of the land is divided: to the north a residential area where roofs are packed without gaps, and to the southwest a zone where buildings with large roofs gather. The fastest way to see in what order the slopes that were fields were filled is to compare the same place while switching the eras. The band of woods that meandered through the valley in the 1961-69 photograph remains as a thin line of green within the town, and the Sakai River flows beneath it. Toward the edges of the frame, squares of fields can still be seen here and there. The framework of running the tracks along the valley floor is the same as 60 years ago, and only what sits on top of it has been replaced.